A selection of media reviews (key paragraphs) of Manual Castells' trilogy
"We live in a period of intense and puzzling transformation, signaling perhaps a move beyond the industrial era altogether. Yet where are the great sociological works that chart this transition? Intellectually feeble accounts of the information society and vacuous accounts of postmodernism and substantive social interpretations. Hence the importance of Manuel Castells's multivolume work in which he seeks to chart the social and economic dynamics of the information age. It would not be fanciful to compare the work to Max Weber's "Economy and Society."
-- Anthony Giddens, director of the London School of Economics, The Times Higher Education Supplement (London), 13 December 1996.
"A prodigious effort to overcome the poverty of an approach to the
information society based on the fragmentation of the social sciences.
When I first read the Giddens review I thought that this was perhaps
slightly exaggerated tribute, but since reading all three volumes of Castells,
reflecting on them and re-reading some of Weber's own work, I no longer
think so."
-- Chris Freeman, Professor and Director of the University of Sussex's Science Policy Research Unit, "New Political Economy," Vol. 3, Number 3, 1998.
"Adam Smith explained how capitaism worked, and Karl Marx explained
why it didn't. Now the social and economic relations of the Information
Age have been captured by Manuel Castells,"
-- G.P. Zachary, "Wall Street Journal," 1 October 1998.
"These three volumes provide a monumental and coherent account of
the economic, social, personal and cultural changes that are occurring
around the world in the age of computerisation. This is not, however, just
another book proclaiming the information revolution. The conception of
the work is vast, but it is performed with such clarity and comprehensiveness
that one cannot imagine the work getting out of date for a very long time."
-- Anthony Smith (President of Magdalen College, Oxford), The Times Higher Education Supplement (London) 4 September 1998.
"The most compelling attempt yet made to map the contours of the
global information age."
-- Anthony Giddens, New Statesman (London), 23 January 1998.
"This book is for anyone who lives and works in the shadow of a
screen. It goes a considerable way to helping us make sense of today's
global information economy and our place in it."
-- Steve McGookin, Financial Times, 3 December 1996.
"A magnum opus if ever there was one, these three books together
constitute, in my view the finest piece of contemporary social analysis
for at least a generation."
-- Frank Webster, British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 49, 1998.
"This book will mark a date. It will be a major reference for those
who try to understand where are we going."
-- Roger-Pol Droit, Le Monde (Paris), 30 January 1998.
"Get ahold of Manuel Castells' three-volume work, The Information
Age - a must-read with its more than 1,200 pages of fact-packed, lucid
prose."
-- Jay Ogilvy, Wired (San Francisco), April 1998.
"A truly stunning achievement. Castells comes as close to being
our owl of Minerva (Hegel's canny philosophical spectator who "takes flight
only at dusk") as we are likely to have - a scholar who, with remarkable
mastery, has brought his experience over a lifetime to bear on astonishinggly
diversified data set, pulling them together into a compelling account of
the complex relationship between the progressive and reactionary, the globalizing
and particularizing forces that are transforming our perplexing world."
-- Benjamin Barber, The Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Reviews, 1999.
"No other scholar has approached the subject of the Information
Age in as engaging and innovative a way as this author."
-- M. Perelman, Choice (Journal of the American Association of Libraries), February 1997.
"The importance of Castells' work lies in his ability to show relationships
among so many seemingly disparate phenomena. And unlike pop futurists as
Alvin Toffler, Castells uses exhaustive field research and the sophisticated
tools of a social scientist."
-- Jack Fischer, San Jose Mercury News, 11 April 1999.
"Manuel Castells, a globally recognized professor of sociology at
the University of California, Berkeley, has written a scholarly trilogy
of books under the general title of The Information Age, that may be the
most important analysis of the interaction between the technology, economics,
politics, and religion ever produced."
-- UPSIDE (San Francisco), November 1997.
"Among technology's intelligentsia Castells has quickly earned a
reputation as a pioneer, someone who has hacked out a logical, well-documented,
and coherent picture of early 21st century civilization, even as it rockets
forward largely in a blur. Noteworthy about Castells's work is its scope
- its attempt to define the forces reshaping societies, from cultural beliefs
to economic practices to political institutions. Not everyone agrees with
Castells's conclusions, but even critics applaud his reach."
-- Paul Van Slambrouck, The Christian Science Monitor, 27 November 1998.
"So far, the person who has straddled the world of social theory
and Silicon Valley most succesfully is Manuel Castells. Mr. Castells enjoys
a growing reputation as the first significant philosopher of cyberspace"
-- The Economist, 30 October 1999.
"The trilogy of Manuel Castells on the information age is a landmark."
-- Andres Ortega, El Pais (Madrid), 22 August 1998.
"The publication of this monumental work constituted from the onset
an authentic, and well deserved, editorial event: numerous reprints, translations,
adoption of the book as a textbook in many colleges, reviews everywhere.
It is justified, since the study by Castells brings together first hand
information with an interpretative framework concerning the complex and
changing socio-political situation in the whole planet in this end of the
century."
-- Editorial, Revista Espanola de Investigacion Sociologica, June 1999)
"Manuel Castells is today the most insightful theoretician of the
information society, perhaps the Marx or the Marcuse of the New Economy.
In his monumental trilogy titled The Information Age he has analyzed the
cultural preconditions of the new industrial revolution."
-- Federico Rampini, La Revista dei Libri (Italy), May 2000.